- The speaker, Katie Robbert, did not see herself becoming a founder or CEO growing up in Alabama.
- She studied design and planned to work in design consulting.
- She unexpectedly ended up at Google as a speechwriter for Marissa Mayer.
- She later left Google to pursue different projects and work with different people.
- She eventually founded Lever with her co-founders.
- Leaving Google was a difficult decision because of the opportunities and comfort it provided.
- She recognized the privilege she had and embraced the opportunity to take risks and try new things.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of taking risks and embracing opportunities for personal growth.
- Leaving Google was easy, but starting Lever was harder because they didn't know exactly what they were going to do at first.
- They believed in a change happening in the world where talent was driving revenue, competitive differentiation, and innovation.
- Lever aimed to address the transformation of industries into knowledge work and the changing dynamics of the workforce.
- They initially built a product that was just a better version of what was already available, but they threw it out and went back to the core fundamentals based on customer feedback.
- Lever went through a period of figuring out their identity as a team and the role of the speaker changed from an individual contributor to CEO.
- Startups competing against big tech companies should focus on their unique value proposition and use their culture to differentiate themselves in the hiring process.
- Proactive recruitment, reaching out to networks, and getting creative in finding potential candidates are key strategies for startups to attract top talent.

- The speaker discusses the importance of finding candidates who align with the company's values and mission.
- They emphasize the value of building relationships and nurturing them over time for hiring purposes.
- The speaker suggests that founders should spend a significant amount of time on hiring and encourage their team to do the same.
- They recommend helping team members find their authentic voice and story about why they are committed to the company.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of motivation fit and suggests asking questions and listening carefully to determine a candidate's motivations.
- They advocate for behavioral interviewing to understand a candidate's patterns of success and failure.
- The speaker acknowledges the challenges of remote work and the need to build a culture that supports it.

- The company Lever initially focused on co-located work, but later started experimenting with remote work and opening a second office.
- Staying together in one office helped build a strong culture and share best practices for scaling the team.
- Hiring in a tight talent market required a strong talent strategy.
- The company developed a method of writing impact descriptions for job postings, which proved to be more effective and inclusive than traditional job descriptions.
- Using impact descriptions attracted top talent and welcomed people from non-traditional backgrounds.
- The company is working on making hiring more inclusive through their product and internally.
- The biggest roadblock to making hiring more inclusive is the tension between hoping software can solve the problem and the need for people to change.
- More success stories of inclusive hiring practices are needed to remove roadblocks.
- Lever constantly runs experiments to make their hiring more inclusive and diversity and inclusion are a big part of their culture.

- The team at Lever has prioritized diversity and inclusion from the beginning, even though they were not initially diverse.
- The biggest roadblock to creating a diverse and inclusive culture is the belief that demographics must reflect diversity before making changes.
- It is important to focus on creating an inclusive culture before investing in diversity in hiring.
- Examples of creating inclusion at Lever include addressing unequal distribution of office chores and reevaluating holiday schedules.
- The company also challenged the stereotype of technical and non-technical roles, recognizing the value of both and encouraging collaboration.
- The founder emphasized the importance of creating a culture where issues can be discussed and action can be taken.

- The speaker believes that many people limit their potential by not realizing they can access creativity and problem-solving skills.
- Having conversations about diversity and inclusion at work can be intimidating, but it is important to create a culture that allows for these discussions.
- The company mentioned, Lever, has implemented various structural and human-focused initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion.
- These initiatives include onboarding sessions on diversity and inclusion, employee resource groups, coaching programs for managers, and assessments to create a common language for discussing differences.
- Celebrating diversity and creating a sense of community is also important, as it helps people feel empowered and comfortable discussing differences.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of building a strong team and culture through effective hiring and talent acquisition.

- Katie Robbert, the speaker, did not expect to become a founder or CEO but ended up founding Lever.
- Leaving Google was a difficult decision, but it allowed her to take risks and try new things.
- Lever aimed to address the transformation of industries into knowledge work and changing dynamics of the workforce.
- Startups should focus on their unique value proposition and use their culture to differentiate themselves in hiring.
- Proactive recruitment and nurturing relationships are key strategies for attracting top talent.
- Lever developed impact descriptions for job postings to attract diverse candidates.
- The company is working on making hiring more inclusive through their product and internally.
- Diversity and inclusion have been prioritized at Lever from the beginning.
- Creating an inclusive culture is important before investing in diversity in hiring.
- Lever has implemented various initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion, including coaching programs and assessments.
- Building a strong team and culture is emphasized through effective hiring and talent acquisition.

Sarah Nahm is the CEO and cofounder of Lever. Lever builds modern recruiting software for teams to source, interview, and hire top talent. They were in the Summer 2012 batch of YC. You can try Lever out at Lever.co.

https://twitter.com/srhnhm
http://lever.co/

Holly Liu is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before that she cofounded the gaming company Kabam.

https://twitter.com/hollyhliu

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:05 - Did Sarah grow up thinking she'd be a founder?

7:25 - Why did she decide to leave Google and start Lever?

13:20 - Thinking about product in the early days of Lever

15:15 - Fundraising and figuring out the team

23:30 - How do you figure out someone's career motivations?

26:50 - Getting concrete when interviewing

28:45 - Hiring remote employees

31:35 - Writing job descriptions around impact

37:05 - Eva Zhang asks - What's the biggest roadblock you faced in trying to make hiring more inclusive to diverse candidates?

41:30 - What does thinking about inclusion mean at a small company?

46:45 - Not buying into technical and nontechnical people

49:50 - Setting up a culture that allows for conversations about diversity and inclusion

So Holly, you have a question to start it off.

Yeah, I'm super curious, did you ever see yourself becoming a founder, a founding CEO?

So I, you know, growing up I could not have grown up further from Silicon Valley.

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, so deep south.

And kind of back then, I probably wanted to be, you know, a different thing when I grew up every 3 months.

I was dabbling in anything, I was dabbling in everything, but probably 1 thing I spent a lot of time on was social justice.

I volunteered at the Civil Rights Institute because all the amazing people that were a part of the civil rights movement, they're obviously still around and they're still doing amazing work.

And that just was something that so defined like my experience of growing up in Alabama.

And when I came out to Stanford for school, for college, I was the first person from my high school to go like west of the Mississippi River for college in like years and had no idea what I wanted to do or who I wanted to become.

And I think that that period at Stanford was a really interesting 1.

Like pre-med was still the number 1 major, which has since changed, I think, to CS.

And it wasn't super obvious that, you know, you as an undergraduate could be a founder.

And my freshman class at Stanford was the first class to start with Facebook.

And I think that that really changed so much in Silicon Valley where young people now were seen as people that could innovate and that could bring kind of game-changing ideas to market.

And I remember so many kind of moments where the people around me were stepping into, you know, taking the leap, like stepping into these kinds of roles and positions where they were just going for it.

And I think subconsciously that influenced me.

I studied design and I always thought I was just going to go into design consulting.

I was like drinking the Kool-Aid, mixing the Kool-Aid, distributing the Kool-Aid to everybody else.

mean I got to admit it's still a huge part of how I see the world, it's still a huge part of what I bring to my company.

So I totally thought that's what I was going to do.

And I was very unfocused in my job search.

I think the only way I even ended up quote unquote applying to Google is like I was dropping off some form for a friend at Stanford's Career Development Center And there was somebody there who worked there was like, oh, are you gonna sign up for the Google interviews?

A part of me is sort of like, look, total privilege check, because it's not normal, so to speak, for there to be a clipboard with a pencil dangling from it, or for you to sign your name up for like an amazing kind of career opportunity.

I, I think I just kind of, like, went into it and was curious and was engaged and I think I was 1 of those annoying ones who couldn't make up my mind and I just had this like outstanding offer for like months like literally 9 months before I officially kind of made the decision.

And then I think even then I didn't know what I would do until my first day of work.

Because you were in that program where you transfer around,

was super funny because I showed up to the new higher orientation and you get your laptop and all the things, and then they have this moment where you're all sitting around in the main cafeteria at Charlie's and you're supposed to get picked up by your manager.

I know, so I'm waiting, find out like what I'm doing.

And I'm still sitting there kind of at the end when everybody's all like set because my first job out of college was total kind of like came out of left field thing, I ended up being a speechwriter, which I never saw coming.

And it was a job that nobody had had before for specifically supporting Merce Meyer.

She was a little tied up, so she couldn't come get me

But I think in a weird way that was probably my crash course in a lot of what it is to be a founder, because I had to create something from nothing and figure out what I was doing and be really bad at it for a while.

And I think also in hindsight, so many lessons learned about leadership and strategy and just getting to be a fly on the wall to conversations way, way, way above my pay grade and out of my element.

And I think to this day, super grateful for it.

I obviously spent time on other things at Google too.

Notably, I spent a lot of time on the Chrome team, which was just incredible, incredible people.

Sundar was leading that initiative at the time, that was amazing.

My direct boss is this amazing growth guy, marketing guy, creative guy, who would go on to be the head of marketing at Instagram.

So yeah, just some amazing people around me.

I've got to ask though, when you speech write, do you use Post-its?

Yeah, I also take it the other way around, which is when I design mocks, I use Keynote, a prototyping tool.

Katie Robbert Yeah, no, I think there's so many insights from a design kind of practice that I think are super applicable to being a founder or to being a CEO.

For a while, I was actually really sad because I was spending less and less time on product.

And for someone who loves product, that was actually really hard.

But then I sort of started reframing a lot of the work that I was doing as a founder around, hey, I still work on a product, the product is this company.

And I still have to do user research, it's just that my users are my employees and my customers.

And that same process for generating a clear strategy around user needs was just as needed, if not more so.

So I really got to say that to me, I think more designers should be founders.

I think that that skill set is so, so relevant to the work it takes to actually get a lot of people together to work in a system and to create value from scratch.

So definitely I think there's some amazing designer founders out there, but a part of me wishes, you know, that there are way more.

Obviously, you jumped around at Google, but it's not obvious as to how a speech writer goes on to found Lever.

Right, which is probably fair for most people in

But was there a point when you were at Google where you thought to yourself, you know what, I'm going to go be a founder?

How did you decide to start Lover, how'd that go?

Edith Piazza Yeah, I mean I think like so many founders, a path is non-linear.

I think you read in mainstream media about these lightning strike moments that suddenly happen.

I mean I think that's all just media, right?

And the personal experience of founding a company.

It's first of all, it's a period of time.

I think that even, you know, leaving Google, I didn't leave to start a company.

I think I left to just grow and experience more things and ended up pursuing a lot of different stuff.

Things ranging from just like personal projects to obviously working with several early stage teams.

And I think personally a lot of what I was really doing at the time that was on the path to founding a company was experiencing working with a lot of different types of people.

Yeah, and so you could say that my co-founders and I were almost trying out working with each other for a while before we actually officially went for it.

And I credit the fit to my co-founders for a lot of the success that we've had as a company.

So in a weird way, I don't think I was doing it consciously at the time, but making sure that you're finding the right people is probably the hardest to predict, but most important part of that super, super early stage.

It seems like you found the people and you were working together, but the idea wasn't quite there.

I mean, and Google was probably still on this rocket ship when you decided to leave or doing really well.

Like, what was the most difficult thing to overcome to just say, I'm gonna be on this, like, what was the thing that a propelled you forward?

And then what was the most difficult thing in getting you to leave?

I mean, first of all, I just have to say, huge privilege check, having been at Stanford and having been at Google.

I think that it's not lost on me that there's a lot of opportunity open to you.

I knew that in a way, there was no good and bad choice spectrum.

And I think a lot of people, I just like knew that I had an opportunity just in my life overall to take risks and try things out and really like grow my my sphere of experience and took that, which, you know, I think people who have it like should embrace it.

And then people who don't have it, I mean, I don't think should beat themselves up about, you know, like having to think a little bit harder on taking the leap.

So in terms of like, you know, leaving Google, that was easy.

I think In a way, it always kind of felt like there was just more to experience.

Yeah, I mean, you know, so for 1, we just didn't know exactly what we were going to do at first.

I think very few teams know exactly what they're going to do.

And probably the biggest thing to truly getting started was, you know, again, people believing in the people that you're working with, believing the people around you.

And then secondly, you know, I think believing in a change that's happening in the world.

And, you know, I think distant third to that is believing that you have what it takes to like, bring some value that speaks to that change, right?

So the change that we were really believing in that I think has really played out ever since was the world was, this is like 2012 when the founders of Lever kind of all got together.

And we just saw that the world was quickly becoming a world where revenue, competitive differentiation, innovation was all driven by talent.

You look at what was limiting the growth of companies.

It was that they couldn't hire enough engineers, they couldn't hire enough salespeople.

You think about what was causing some companies to win over others.

It was because there was some sort of 10x talent thing happening that led to some sort of leapfrog in what they're bringing to market or you know some sort of like better marketing strategy.

So essentially what was happening is just like kind of software was eating the world, knowledge work was eating the world.

Like as kind of technology and digital transformation was playing out in every single industry.

Even the most blue of blue collar work, manufacturing, was transforming into something that looked a lot more like knowledge work, you know?

Like you don't need just undifferentiated assembly line workers.

You needed people who could program a robotic arm or rethink manufacturing process.

So that was happening in every single industry and it was really transforming how organizations had to think about people and HR and hiring.

Because gone were the days of my parents' generation where you join a company and you work your way up the career ladder.

My dad has had very few employers this whole career.

And nowadays, millennials, Gen Z, they're entering the workforce and people are staying at jobs for 345 years.

I think it's 18 months or something right now.

So did you guys feel that, was there a unique insight in the beginning or were you just like, we're going to go, we see this change happening and we're just going to build a newer, better version?

How did you approach product in the beginning?

way, first of all, the beginning, that blurry period, that probably lasted 2 and a half years.

I would say we were super engaged in making sure we were defining the problem.

And I think in a way probably different from other companies we didn't rush too quickly to solutions.

And then we've always been at the end of the day driven by our users and our customers and making sure that we're being honest to them and holding ourselves accountable to them.

You can think that you're delivering this game-changing such and such platform something something, but what your customers say about you, or what they say to their friends when they're talking about your software, that's ultimately who you are.

So I would actually say that first we built an entire thing and actually had to kind of come to terms with what our customer feedback kind of was.

And we had built just something incremental and we had built something that was just a better version of what was there before.

And I think went back to the core fundamentals.

So you kind of ask, did we know what we were building?

I think that while we didn't know literally what product or what solution we were going to bring to market from the beginning.

What we did know was how we were going to hold ourselves accountable and that was through listening to our customers.

Matzkoff Though you were in the startup game, which implies VC, which implies pitching VC.

Even your industry wasn't really as much of a thing as it is now, 7 years later.

What was that process like in 20, did you fundraise in 2012?

Warren So we did our first meaningful round of fundraising, series A, in October 2014.

So I would definitely say 2012 to 2014 was that process of us figuring out what problem we were solving, how to achieve product market fit, how to build that traction that you want to show.

And I think in that period we also discovered a lot about ourselves as a team.

In that period, just for me personally, I went from being an individually contributing designer to literally kind of on the eve of our series A.

We had signed a term sheet, but we hadn't closed the round.

Kind of we as a team collectively agreed I should be CEO.

And if you're not confronting those hard things about who are we and what are we here to do, who am I and what am I doing?

I think that you can put it off for just so long before it actually starts to intersect with what you can achieve as a company, as a team.

So when I think of those early days, yeah, all fronts we were figuring out who we were.

And it's some of the most fun and terrifying chapters you've ever had at Lever.

So now we're way further down the timeline and you do have kind of unique positions on recruiting, culture, and diversity.

Back then I assume you were just again, figuring stuff out, right?

A lot of our listeners are early founders and they are competing against Facebook and Google.

I was going to call it Facebook and Google.

How do you differentiate as a small startup and land the top talent?

It's a global talent market, and I think that It's competitive in so many ways.

Every startup I think does have this experience of there's well-resourced recruiting machines that are kind of out there.

And on the flip side, early stage startups have such a unique opportunity to offer.

And so I think advice for startups is to spend actually a lot of time thinking about what truly is your value prop.

Actually figuring out how you're going to approach hiring and what is the way that you can almost use your culture in all of its unique glory as, like, go on the offense with it.

Because you can so run circles around a lot of the competition by bringing that experience of what it's like to work at your company into the candidate experience.

So yeah, I think that there's so many kind of like hand-to-hand combat tactics that startups can employ that give them, frankly, a much better shot at recruiting the most talented people than these sort of large environments.

Can you give us an example that you guys did at Lever?

I think the first thing is, you know, proactive recruiting.

So, you know, any startup out there that's just posting a job and waiting for great people to apply.

Hiring is the strategy when you're a startup.

There's a period at which you can be the best founder on the planet and you will be holding your own company back if you haven't figured out how to truly prioritize hiring, how to truly invest in it, and how to do it damn well.

Duffie How did you guys proactively do it?

McElhaney Yeah, so this is actually a concrete thing.

Proactive recruitment, I think it's going outbound.

In the same way you wouldn't just throw up a website and wait for customers to come find you, you've got to actually reach out to people.

The first thing that everybody tells you is reach out to your network.

You should still do it, but you'll tap that out at some point.

And then I think what you have to start doing is getting really confident, reaching out to people that you believe are going to be strong fits at your company, that you're finding, not just on LinkedIn, though you should, and then you'll tap it out.

Get creative, look at meetups, look at Eventbrite, look at GitHub.

GitHub's a great place to find people if you actually know what your technology value prop is.

Katie Grant What's been the most surprising source for you guys?

Something you just didn't expect, you're like, wow, I would not have expected to find a

Honestly, We have so many amazing and unique hiring stories in our company.

Our team, so my engineering org has largely been built up by my co-founder, Nate Smith, who we are a recruiting software company, so we think a lot about hiring.

And I would say that you can genuinely find people and connect with people anywhere.

And I think the other thing that's been remarkable about our hiring strategy has been so many people that we actually hire.

We actually met them and nurtured those relationships.

You're investing in, I don't want to call it a database of talent.

It's like you're investing in relationships and you may not see returns from those immediately, but those are going to be the people that actually, when it is their right time, when they're ready to make their next move, they're already going to be familiar with your team, with your culture, with your mission.

They actually get hired, we have the data to prove this, 35% faster than people who are meeting you for the first time.

So people I think are familiar with the cliche that as a founder you should be spending 50% of your time on hiring.

I'm just like it's a cliche because it's true.

And I think hiring just takes so many forms And I think 1 thing is obviously go out and meet people.

No expectations, no strings attached, let's meet.

Second thing you can do is encourage people on your team to do the same.

I think actually, For whatever reason, people feel awkward pitching their friends about job opportunities.

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Startup Hiring Advice from Lever CEO Sarah Nahm with Holly Liu